Solidoodle & Arch linux

Okay, it’s been a while since I got my nice & shiny 3d printer from solidoodle. A few people have asked, so there go a few tips, to make the software up running on Arch Linux. I’ll be posting a detailed review sometime later, since I’m kind if buried under the ongoing projects.

Before starting to do anything, make sure you do NOT have modemmanager running

ps aux|grep modem

ps aux|grep modem

This is a plugin for networkmanager that works with 3g dongles. It’s ugly, and it always opens up any serial port it can get hold of, and checks if it’s a modem issuing AT commands. It can do so in the middle of the print job, screwing up things for you (since it also sets the baudrate to a different value). So before even starting to do anything stop, disable (or even) remove this piece of crap from the system.

pacman -R modemmanager

pacman -R modemmanager

Okay, back to the software. All of the software is written in python, therefore one should expect the usual mess of a python-based project.
Please note, that neither the pronterface, nor the skeinforge that came shipped in the official archive work with python 3, which is default for Arch.
So, first, give a quick read of the instructions and grab the software from this page and unzip.
Then, we need to install a few dependencies:

sudo pacman -S python2-pyserial wxpython pyglet

sudo pacman -S python2-pyserial wxpython pyglet

To run pronterface, use:

python2 pronterface.py

python2 pronterface.py

However, this will fail to start skeinforge, since it will try python3 for that
Therefore, the simplest workaround will be adding a small launcher script, that will add a small alias to start pronterface and friends.

#!/bin/bashaliaspython=python2
python pronterface.py

#!/bin/bash
alias python=python2
python pronterface.py

I’ll make a PKGBUILD and upload it to AUR some time in future, but for now this should be enough to get things running.
P.S. I really suggest throwing skeinforge away asap and using slic3r instead. Skeinforge is TERRIBLY slow and ugly.